Barbados: Cuffee’s Kingdom – First Black New World Freedom Plan

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Barbados 1675 Anti-slavery Strategy – The Akan/Ghana Political Complex in the Caribbean

By: Hilary McD Beckles

SKU: 060 Category: History

Description

“Their grand design was to choose them a king, one Cuffee an Ancient Gold Coast Negro, who should have been Crowned the 12th of June past in a Chair of State exquisitely wrought and carved after their mode; with Bowes and Arrowes to be likewise carried in State before his Majesty their intended king.”

Governor Sir Jonathan Atkins to
Secretary for Colonies, Sir Joseph Williamson
October 3, 1675, CSPC 1675–1675

In the 1600s Barbados attained a double identity. It became the site where the English pioneered the sugar plantation chattel slave economy, and it also hosted the planning for the creation of the first free Black state outside of Africa. From the annals of history, renowned Caribbean Historian Hilary McD Beckles unearths the story of King Cuffee and his 1675 Freedom Plan – the first comprehensive revolutionary plan to topple a colonial regime and replace it with an African government.

Meticulously researched and recorded, Beckles presents King Cuffee, the would-be First Freedom Figure in Barbados and the wider Americas, the New World, and builds on his earlier works postulating the political and cultural contribution of enslaved Africans to global appreciation of human rights, freedom, and justice. The Akan of Ghana, he argues, crafted the “first and most politically sophisticated counter-slavery strategy in the Americas,” and Cuffee, a Barbados Coromantee, was the epitome of the political consciousness and culture of the Akan of Ghana in the Caribbean.

Barbados: Cuffee’s Kingdom brings to light yet another hidden component in the greatest crime against humanity – the transatlantic and global chattel enslavement of over 50 million Africans for Western enrichmenty – and richly adds to the ongoing rediscovery and recitation of the global experiences of Africans.

Additional information

Weight	2 lbs
Dimensions	9 × 6 in
ISBN	978-976-8286-41-3
Binding	Paperback
Page Count	128
Publication Date	April 2021

List of Tables

Preface and Acknowledgements

Prologue – Battleground Barbados: First Akan Freedom Plan

‘Devil in the English’: Chattel Slavery Begins
African Objection and Resistance
First Chattel Slavery Code: Act of 1661
King Cuffee’s Vision: First Freedom Plan, 1675
Children of the Fire: Second Freedom Plan, 1692

Epilogue

Appendices

Origins and Development of African Enslavement in Barbados
The 1649 Freedom Plot
The Barbados Slave Code of 1661
Great Newes from the Barbadoes. OR, A True and Faithful Account of the Grand Conspiracy OF THE Negroes against the English
The Conspiracy of Cuffey in 1675
A Brief, but Most True Relation of the Late Barbarous and Bloody Plot of the Negroes in the Island of Barbados October, 1692
The Conspiracy of the Negroes of Barbados in 1692
Voyage of the Slave Ship, Hannibal, from the Gold Coast to Barbados, 1692

Select Bibliography

About the Author

Professor Sir Hilary McD Beckles is vice-chancellor of The University of the West Indies and chairman of the CARICOM Reparations Commission. A distinguished academic, university administrator and global activist, he has lectured extensively in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas and is the recipient of numerous awards from universities across the world. He is the author of numerous publications including Cricket without a Cause: Fall and Rise of the Mighty West Indian Test Cricketers (2017), Britain’s Black Debt: Reparations for Caribbean Slavery and Native Genocide (2012), Trading Souls: Europe’s Transatlantic Trade in Africans (2007) and Saving Souls: The Struggle to End the Transatlantic Trade in Africans (2007).